People involved in the £4B UK curry industry overwhelmingly backed Brexit on the promise of future easing off of visa requirements for curry chefs from south Asia, hoping to reverse the current waves of curry restaurant closures driven by a lack of skilled chefs.

The Black Friday Mac Bundle 2.0 is one of the Boing Boing Store’s best-selling Mac bundles yet, and it’s about to come to an end. If you don’t get your copy now, here’s what you’ll be missing:This bundle comes packing 9 top-rated Mac apps in one package, at the hugely discounted price of just $23.99. […]

The Boing Boing Store’s Gift Guide is full of ideas for pretty much anyone in your life like hipster ice cub trays, Xbox controllers, Halo Boards, and even diamond necklaces. As always, all products in the Boing Boing Store come at great discounts, too. Shop by price bucket starting at under $20. Under $20:Bloxx Jumbo Ice Trays […]

Unlike traditional lighters, the SaberLight features an electronic plasma beam that’s both rechargeable and butane-free. This sleek lighter is even approved by TSA, so you’ll never be stuck buying lighters you’ll just have to throw away partially used. For some people, like me, this is a pretty big game-changer. The SaberLight’s beam is actually both hotter and cleaner […]

I, for one, CAN NOT BELIEVE that Safeway brand food doesn’t live up to expectations. I am SHOCKED! After all, the food always looks like the picture on the front of the box (sez the ex-commercial photographer while laughing loudly).

So what if it looks like poop? Everything looks like poop after you eat it anyway.

That said, “the meat part wasn’t that bad,” might be a good quote for the front of the package, maybe with the image of a kid eating it while being scolded by his mom holding a rolling pin and wagging her finger.

Oh yeah, ALL of the Safeway frozen products look absolutely fucking stunning on the box. Whoever is putting those box designs and pics together is a damn evil genius. Just a few days ago I was considering a box of chocolate cake with a shiny, smooth ganache draped over it ever so lovingly, but then I thought about how every Safeway frozen item I’ve ever bought is just awful. Blech.

I shop in Safeway practically every day. But I never ever eat the Safeway-brand frozen foods. Instead, I pick up proper ingredients to cook myself a fine home-made meal (tonight was chicken breast in a tomato/garlic/ginger/yogurt/almond/nutmeg sauce over basmati rice). That’s actually pretty easy to do from Safeway, in my experience.

I can’t see the box well enough in the photo to tell whether it’s there, but here in the states, the FTC (IIRC) makes (at least used to make) packaged food makers label their spectacularly optimistic package photos with those words. Most used the smallest, lowest-contrast font they could find, of course.

The idea was to dash our ever-hopeful consumer expectations, warning us that what was inside wouldn’t really look anything like the picture – excuse me, the “illustration.”

I’ve seen a lot of frozen “food” that barely looked the part, but I think this is the first time I’ve seen it look quite so much like – uh, yeah. That.

I would have thought that someone would have compiled a video of all the times that Moman tells Thérese that it’s steak, blé ‘dinde, patates in the Québecois satire “La Petite Vie” (Thérese would screw it up, in a different way, once per episode). Pâté chinois (shepherd’s pie) was once voted the national dish of Québec.

The real question is why are you buying Safeway branded goods and expecting anything different? You disappoint me Mr Doctorow (I’ll assume you have one locally, and that it’s convenient).

I hate to sound pretentious but if you’re buying own-brand from any of the ‘cheap’ supermarkets (namely Asda and Tesco, ESPECIALLY Asda) – then you’re almost definitely buying shit. It’s that cheap for a very good reason. It’s also where they make all the cuts to be able to offer the ‘lowest prices’.

If you have to feed a family of 4 on £20 a week, then fair enough – otherwise it’s a saving at the cost of your own pleasure.

I care about this because even better supermarkets/food shops have joined this ‘offer the cheapest prices game’, and I’ve already seen products I enjoy start to lose quality, all for the sake of a marketing competition and at the expense of suppliers and consumers. So I saved £3, but hated my meal; how does that benefit me?

While I can’t speak on the frozen food front (I hate frozen food), I do buy allot of Safeway branded products. By an large, they are of a higher quality than the name brand at about 2/3 the price. They also tend to include fewer unpronounceable ingredients.

I’d choose an M&S/Waitrose/similar own brand product over most name brand (although let’s be fair, we’re only talking marginally better, I’m not pretending it’s a whole different world). The same may be the case at Safeway actually, just realised I haven’t been there in what must be 6 years, I could be judging them unfairly – I’m just going on my personal experience.

The only thing they’re all equally bad at is fruit and veg. Unsurprisingly storing fresh produce in carbon dioxide for 6 months takes its toll. Supermarket veg actually often makes me mad – I’ll be honest.

Someone put it better than me elsewhere on the internet just yesterday: “It’s a race to the bottom with the only loser being you”. We demand cheaper prices, and that’s what they deliver. By the time everyone realises that they’re buying absolute crap it’ll be too late; we’re not far off as it is.

Sorry, but I’m calling BS on this one. One local supermarket chain here in D/FW is Tom Thumb,a subsidiary of Safeway, and we buy this product all the time during the colder months of the year. It comes out of the oven looking substantially like the picture on the box (with allowances for “professional food photography”) and dishes out like, well…regular old shepard’s pie with the meat filling below and the potatoes on top. The sample on the plate shown here looks like it was stirred rather vigorously before the picture was taken – and there isn’t a shepard’s pie made that would look pretty after *that* treatment.

So if you don’t like shepard’s pie, that’s fine – but make sure people know that before casting aspersions on a reasonable, if certainly not gourmet, product.